[Leica] re: how to appreciate the lousy photos of others

[kcassidy at asc.upenn.edu (Kyle Cassidy)]

bob sed:
 
>In fact, this is one reason that I'm surprised that Kyle claims not to 
>"get" the
>Eggleston thing, since one of the things I really like about his shots 
>strikes me as a similarly original use of color.
>
>Bob Palmieri

aaaagh!
 
did i ever tell you about the time that eggelston and i went to the amish 
farmers market together? he was buying goat cheese, by the pound, i have no 
freaking idea why, but we were in a huge rental car, you could have put a 
brass band in this thing, some sort of cadillac or somewhat from the 1970's 
-- this was back in '85 or '86 and i wasn't sleeping a lot at the time, so 
it's a bit fuzzy -- anyway, he had all this damn goat cheese, maybe forty or 
fifty pounds of it. we'd drive down the road, all the while, his mouth is 
flapping conspiracy theories, UFO's, algier hiss, that kind of stuff, he'd 
see  a farmers market and slam on the brakes, skid us to the side of the 
road and leap out demanding freaking goat cheese. "do you have any goat 
cheese?!" he'd bellow, "i must have the goat cheese!" he'd throw wads of 
money at them. he didn't even count it anymore. It had been like this for 
days, half of the stuff was rancid, it smelled like we had a dead hooker in 
the trunk. he wanted to take all this goat cheese to Estes Kefauver's house 
-- give it to him with this crudely drawn birthday card he'd made back when 
we were staying in SoHo. we'd be going flat out through these backwater 
highways, blasting past buggies at 110, 115 miles an hour, the horses would 
go mad as we whipped past, the shock wave from just the air must have been 
incredible, but eggelston -- that was hardly enough for his psychotic mind, 
he'd always lay on the horn, BRAAAAP! and the horse would fly up into the 
air and before you could see the buggy completely tip over in the rear view, 
we were so far down the road it would have been impossible without 
binoculars anyway. the point of this story is that eggelston had a camera 
around his neck, it was a nikon FE with a motor drive, he had the thing 
around his neck like Flav-a-Flave, wore it everywhere, with this crazy radio 
reciever attached to the top of it -- some rube goldberg device they made 
for him up at MIT, it looked like an alarm clock hidden in a loaf of bread. 
Anyway, there was this girl in Des Moins -- I can hardly call her a girl, 
she was about 45, but anyway, she was in an iron lung and had been since she 
was like 3 or 4, and all she ever did was stare up at the ceiling and watch 
"the price is right". she could move one finger, just one. and eggelston had 
given her this box with a radio antenna, and when she pushed that button, 
wherever he was in the country, that camera would go off. KACHING! and take 
a picture of whatever was in front of egg. it was the darndest thing i ever 
saw. but that's how we got his portfolio together. when we finally made it 
to Burnt Church, Tennissee, we had all the film developed and sorted by a 
gorilla at the zoo there and sent back to his agent. Wait, his agent might 
have been the gorilla, like i said, this is all a bit hazy ---
 
kc